1. Field
The disclosed embodiments generally relate to software development tools. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to the design of a front-end development tool that displays diagnostic information and/or performance metrics to facilitate web page development.
2. Related Art
In modern websites, a great amount of effort can go into assembling and rendering a web page that is ultimately presented to a user. For example, a front-end server that generates the web page frequently makes calls to one or more back-end servers to perform various operations and to gather data from multiple sources for the web page. Next, the front-end server incorporates this data into markup for the web page and sends the markup to a browser on a client system to be displayed to the user.
This distributed web-page-creation process can make it challenging to fix an error in the web page, because it is often difficult to identify the source of the error. For example, if a web page is generated for a user in a French-speaking country, the front-end server can translate the web page into French, and can possibly make calls to one or more back-end servers to perform various operations or to gather data to facilitate the translation process. In this case, if there is an error in the French-language text on the web page, the developer must somehow identify the source of the error, which can possibly exist in a number of files or servers located on different machines. In existing systems, this typically involves sifting through log files on various front-end and/or back-end servers to identify the source of the error, which can be an extremely time-consuming process.